Unofficial news and tips about Google

September 26, 2008

More Languages in Google Translate

Google Translate added 11 new languages: Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Google's machine translation service now supports 35 languages and you can use it to translate text between any combination of languages.

In most cases, Google uses English as an intermediary language, so when you translate a text from Indonesian to Vietnamese, Google translates the text to English and then it translates the result to Vietnamese. You'll get the best results when one of the languages is English, since Google needs a single translation.

"Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model," explains Google.

One of the advantages of this approach is scalability: if Google finds enough parallel text to create a good translation model for a language, it will be added to Google Translate. When Google licensed Systran's technology, Google Translate was only able to translate between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but this has changed when Google developed its own translation technology. Microsoft followed suit and Windows Live Translator switched from Systran to Microsoft's machine translation system.

As Microsoft notes, it's important to keep in mind that "automatic translation enables you to understand the gist of foreign language text, but is no substitute for a professional human translator if fluency is required," at least not yet.

Machine translation, including Google's, is not much better than it was 40+ years ago when I was studying it in college. Brute force will never solve the problem, no matter how many CPU cycles or petabytes of data you throw at it. It needs to be approached differently. Perhaps trying to mimic mental processes would work bettter, now that we can zero in on some mental activity via an MRI.

Turkish language structure is very complicated, you always append millions different kind of addition at the end of a word.It s no like other languages, i think it is reason why they are not able to that, even though there is a lot of turkish google users than other small country users.

Hi everyone, you are so great people to offer us language tools for free, thanx!! But could you please add the Frisian [=Fries = Frysk] language, because you have got Dutch, so Frisian shuold be present too. And what about Saqartvelo, Mongolian, Cambodjan, Amharic, Aramaic, Syraic??I would be very pleased to see these languages on GOOGLE TRANSLATE... : )

I must say that the translation from Hebrew to English in the example above shows just how much more work is needed in order to perfect computerized translations.

Take for instance the airline KLM that appears in the article. Since the Hebrew letters do not match the latin ones, the letters are sounded out (Kay - El - Em) and the computerized translation then translates the meaning of the words El and Em (To and If).

There are also 3 instances in-which words are that weren't recognized were transposed phonetically (poorly too)... The words for Intended, Holland and Citizen.

@Anonymous:You must understand that Google uses statistical machine translation, so the results depend a lot on the parallel texts used to create language models.

The word "slovenskih" is translated in different ways, depending on the context. Try to translate "slovenskih" at translate.google.com and you'll get the right translation. Unfortunately, Croatian and Slovenian are used in similar contexts and Google couldn't find the right correspondence. As Google obtains more parallel texts, the translation's quality will improve.

Google translates Filipino language erroneously. The entire meaning changed drammatically when I tried to translate a tagalog paragraph into English.I tried changing my gmail language settings into filipino, and the same thing happened. It is actually funny and irritating at the same time that the words and terms that are similar in meaning are interchanged and sometimes terms are used in the wrong context.

What the hell is wrong with you guys? Google Translate isn't obligated to include EVERY SINGLE language out there, just because it happens to be YOUR native tongue.

I can sort of understand Turkish, since it's the 23rd-most-spoken language (which really isn't that high, but if Google already has 35 languages so far, then it makes logistical sense), but those of you suggesting (or even DEMANDING) all these obscure languages that have very little global impact are just being crazy, if not selfish.

There is no logic some of a languages you have two times, such as the Serbian and Croatian-(it is the same language),oter side , some languages simply do not exsist.Example, Macedonian, Turkish, Albanian... I suggest to remove the Greek language and insert the Macedonian , because the entire so-called Greece is Makedonija.Thanks!

it is necessary to enter the Macedonian language, because half of Macedonia is in the United States, Australia, Canada and many other countries around the world.Magotity of them use this services.If this service is because of practical resons, please enter the Macedonian language.

Absolutely unusual is to be exercised Translation from English to English, Spanihs to Spanich ...... But in Googol it is possible for egzample: Serbian to Croatian which is a same language. Please to introduce and MAKEDONIAN. Thanks.

People keep saying they want Turkish language added, yeah I want that too. However you miss some little detail, which in long terms become a BIG problem. Turkish does not have the same grammar structure as most of the languages included in Google Translate. And if you still want to believe Google is ignoring you, just go and type a Turkish sentence into Google Translate and set to auto-detect language. It will tell you "Turkish to English is not available yet". Which means the database is being prepared (or some idiots can think "YaY, Computer can speak TURKISH!!!). Either way sooner or later we will get Turkish. But give them some time or it will be very deficient and unusable as in fluency and grammar wise.

I needed Estonian but it isn't there. The translation is often using the wrong word so I wouldn't use it to translate text for publication, it's only good for reading yourself to get some idea of what is said.

thanks for turkishbut i cant think of that translations wont appropriate

turkish is very difficult to learn and/or translate any other languagesan examplebahtsız bedeviyi çölde kutup ayısı öpermiş polar bear ****s unlucky nomad in the desertis it good?can google does it better

there's no such thing as a " macedonian" language. Skopje has a population of 500000 . Of them only around 300000 are the so called macedonians . Macedonian is a slavic language. Actually the same as bulgarian . SO you can always use bulgarian.